Anik See’s Cabin Fever (Fish Gotta Swim) opens with the narrator leaving the (unnamed) city behind in the dead of winter, heading for the woods with little more than a backpack, snowshoes and a sleeping bag. After making camp in the snow, with night falling, she begins to hear the wolves circling, “rotat[ing] counter-clockwise around me, circling the tarp like the second hand on a clock.” Despite this dramatic opening, Cabin Fever is much more a novel of introspection than of action. Settled in her family’s isolated cabin to work on her writing, the narrator reflects upon her past—fishing, exploring logging roads by bike—as well as on her later life in Holland. She recalls extended conversations with Max, a Dutch restorer of old books, whose workshop is “scattered with scalpels, small irons, leather shavings, bone folders, and brass finishing tools.” Her solitary reflections and her conversations with Max range from the deeply philosophical to the banal, from the mass migrations of this century—“people waiting, waiting, waiting before they can start their new lives”—to the seeming impossibility and yet inevitability of death. The German writer W.G. Sebald is an obvious inspiration for Cabin Fever, which opens with an epigram taken from a 1997 interview of Sebald by Eleanor Wachtel. As with Sebald’s work, the text of Cabin Fever is scattered with embedded photographs: the family cabin, the docks of Amsterdam, a disassembled antiquarian book in the process of being rebound. Cabin Fever is not a summer beach book, but it would be perfect for a wintry night sitting before a fire, wolves circling in the outer darkness.‍

—Michael Hayward